Indigenous Self-Determination and Applied Anthropology in Canada: Finding a Place to Stand

Abstract

IntroductionI want to begin by thanking Jim Waldram and the nominating committee for presenting me with this award. It is quite an honour. I am particularly pleased to accept an award named for Sally Weaver and Ade Tremblay. I had the great pleasure of working with them at the founding and early development of CASCA. I learned much of lasting benefit from their attitudes and their approaches both professionally and personally.I am also very pleased that this occasion gives me the opportunity to acknowledge my debt to Dr. Sol Tax. I took my first undergraduate cultural anthropology course from him at the University of Chicago in 1963. After graduation in 1965, I volunteered for a brief period on a project that he developed with the Cherokee in Oklahoma. Were it not for the intervention of the Vietnam War, I am certain I would have continued with that project rather than return immediately to the academy. What I have done in my research career owes a great deal to the vision Dr. Tax provided.In my talk today, I want to share the understanding I have come to regarding my role as an applied anthropologist who works with First Nations and how this understanding has been informed by, and grounded in, both Western and Indigenous political thought.I am taking up this topic for two reasons. First, I am finding that many students who intend to work with First Nations on matters involving Indigenous rights believe that they must limit their own agency to giving technical support or providing space for the voice of the First Nations. Second, since the summer of 1969 when my wife, Margaret, and I moved for a year to Wrigley (now Pi Dze Ki) in the Northwest Territories or Denendeh, I have spent the majority of my professional life engaged in issues surrounding Indigenous self-determination in Canada. I have played many technical roles and learned many lessons. This occasion gives me the opportunity to reflect on these experiences in order to examine principles through which I have come to orient my own agency. This process has been helpful to me and I hope that the thoughts contained in this talk may provide some place for reflection for others as we all grapple with finding a place to stand.Specifically, my comments are situated in the political relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state and I turn first to a brief summary of what has occurred. The past thirty years have borne witness to an incredible struggle, led by First Nations, to gain political and legal recognition of their proper relationship to Canada. It has had its significant successes as well as numerous setbacks. But the work is hardly over.Indeed, the relationship has moved to a new stage. Courts, as in the Mik'maq fishing case, have gone fairly far in providing interpretations of treaties that recognize subsistence and economic rights. But governments have failed to enforce the law, with a resultant strong backlash. Similarly in British Columbia, where I now live, one political party, likely to form the next government, is determined to hold a referendum that intends, at best, to cut back on the limited range of remedies now provided for redress through negotiations. The courts, as I have detailed elsewhere (Asch, 1999), once an ally in expanding Canadian state ideology on the notion of Aboriginal rights, have all but closed the door and are quickly moving in the opposite direction. Most significant is the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Van der Peet which excluded abstract political rights, such as a right to self-determination, from the definition of Aboriginal rights. Rather, it insisted that the settlement of Aboriginal rights be based solely on their presumed cultural distinctiveness. With that decision, we in Canada are hurtling toward a period much like that of Indirect Rule in British Colonial Africa where cultural difference, rather than colonial relations, formed the basis for the expression of any Indigenous rights. …